Hello app engineers! I'm on an app engine project where I'd like to put in a link to a Javascript test runner that I'd like to only exist when running the development server. I've made some experiments on a local shell with configuration loaded using the technique found in NoseGAE versus live on the 'App Engine Console' [1] and it looks to me like a distinction btw real instance and dev server is the presence of the module google.appengine.tools. Which lead me to this utility function:

def is_dev():
    """
    Tells us if we're running under the development server or not.
    :return:
    ``True`` if the code is running under the development server.
    """
    try:
        from google.appengine import tools
        return True
    except ImportError:
        return False

The question (finally!) would be: is this a bad idea? And in that case, can anyone suggest a better approach?

[1] http://con.appspot.com/console/ (try it! very handy indeed)